Mark E. Baisch v. Frank G. Gallina, McKinnon Insurance Agency, Inc., Peter G. Rubino, Jr., Peter G. Rubino, Sr., and John Does 1-25

346 F.3d 366, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 20127, 2003 WL 22255599
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Second Circuit
DecidedOctober 2, 2003
DocketDocket 02-9047
StatusPublished
Cited by82 cases

This text of 346 F.3d 366 (Mark E. Baisch v. Frank G. Gallina, McKinnon Insurance Agency, Inc., Peter G. Rubino, Jr., Peter G. Rubino, Sr., and John Does 1-25) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Mark E. Baisch v. Frank G. Gallina, McKinnon Insurance Agency, Inc., Peter G. Rubino, Jr., Peter G. Rubino, Sr., and John Does 1-25, 346 F.3d 366, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 20127, 2003 WL 22255599 (2d Cir. 2003).

Opinion

JOHN M. WALKER, JR., Chief Judge.

Plaintiff-appellant Mark Baisch appeals from the judgment of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (William D. Wall, Magistrate Judge), (1) granting the motion for summary judgment by defendants-appellees Frank Gallina and McKinnon-Doxsee Insurance Agency, Inc., on the grounds that Baisch did not have standing under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”), 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-68, to bring his claims against any of the defendants, and (2) declining to exercise its supplemental jurisdiction over Baisch’s state law claims.

I. BACKGROUND

A. The Racketeering Scheme

Baisch is in the business of providing construction services, including extending financing to other construction firms. The Rubinos are father and son contractors who operated Raycon Construction Company. Gallina is a shareholder, broker, and vice-president of McKinnon-Doxsee Insurance Agency, which provides or brokers insurance. Gallina and Rubino, Jr. were friends who were in regular contact. Because we are reviewing the district court’s grant of summary judgment against Baisch, the following facts are presented in a light most favorable to Baisch.

According to Baisch, the defendants defrauded him, as well as Nassau County and unnamed insurance companies, by falsifying construction documents, payroll forms, and other documents. Starting in 1990, Nassau County hired Raycon for various construction projects. One of the terms of their contract was that the workers on the projects could not be independent contractors, but had to be employed by Raycon. The contract also required Raycon to post performance bonds and to provide the County periodically with proof of workers’ compensation, disability, and general public liability insurance. Raycon had to provide the County with estimates of the number and type of workers needed for each project, along with the number of hours to be worked and the hourly rate per worker. Baisch claims that the defendants engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity by causing Raycon to submit to Nassau County fraudulent documents, including inflated estimates and falsified claim vouchers. Baisch alleges that by 1990 Gallina and McKinnon-Doxsee, who were providing insurance brokerage services to Raycon, knew that the Rubinos were engaged in racketeering activity. Gallina and McKinnon-Doxsee helped the Rubinos and Raycon obtain the insurance policies and performance bonds to enable them to continue their racketeering activities, provided them with false certificates of insurance, and fraudulently obtained replacement policies when Raycon’s policies were cancelled for nonpayment. Gallina and McKinnon-Doxsee also prepared false information to be used by the workers’ compensation and disability insurance carriers in their payroll audits of Raycon in order to reduce Raycon’s premiums.

In April 1994, Baisch alleges that Gallina asked him if he would provide a commercial loan to Raycon and the Rubinos, whom *370 Gallina represented as reliable and creditworthy. Baiseh claims that he relied on Gallina’s representations when he made his first loan to the Rubinos that year and thereafter continued lending them money until July 1996. The Rubinos allegedly used those funds to support their fraudulent activity.

In February 1997, after Baiseh had checked Raycon’s credit, Baiseh and Rubi-no, Jr. entered into a factoring agreement, under which Baiseh would loan money to Raycon approximately equal to the amount of Raycon’s claim vouchers submitted to Nassau County. Then Baiseh would collect on each loan when Nassau County paid Raycon for its claimed work. Baiseh alleges that Gallina urged him to enter the factoring agreement and reiterated earlier misrepresentations of Raycon’s and the Rubinos’ financial reliability. Gallina conceded that he arranged for the 1994 loan from Baiseh to Raycon so that he could “procure the necessary bond for Raycon, because Raycon lacked the funds needed for collateral.”

Baiseh argues that the Rubinos used the 1997 factoring agreement “to continue the racketeering activities.” Under the factoring agreement, the Rubinos submitted forty-four vouchers to Baiseh between February 1997 and May 1999, upon which Baiseh advanced to Raycon more than $850,000. Baiseh alleges that the vouchers were fraudulent and that some of the vouchers were never even submitted to Nassau County, leading Baiseh to provide loans that, under the terms of the factoring agreement, could not be repaid. The Ru-binos failed to repay ten loans from Baiseh and only partially repaid four more, leaving $306,000 unpaid. In August 1999, at a meeting with Baiseh and Baisch’s attorney, Rubino, Jr. admitted to Baiseh that he had submitted false invoices to him in order to obtain the needed loans. Rubino, Jr. later that month signed a confession of judgment in favor of Baiseh in the amount of $357,440.21.

Supporting his allegation that Gallina and McKinnon-Doxsee knew of Rubino’s fraudulent activities, and hence were racketeering co-conspirators, Baiseh offers statements by Gallina from a videotape surreptitiously recorded in March 2000, about a year after the Rubinos began defaulting on his loans and several months after the authorities started investigating Raycon’s fraud schemes. Gallina does not deny that he made these statements. Rather, Gallina argues that his later depositions, in which he denied knowledge of the fraud, are more credible than the recordings. He also does not argue that the videotape should be inadmissible in this civil proceeding.

In the videotape, Gallina states:

You know the situation over there and the time sheets that [Rubino] was submitting with phony names on it. He was getting them signed off when he didn’t have any people there ... [Rubi-no has been engaged in these practices for] [t]en ... years at least that I know of ... [I]t’s been going on forever. He was paying off everybody that he could.
See, I thought it was a matter of okay, he gets these phony time sheets. Guys sign off on it. He pays these guys a few bucks for signing off on it. But it must have gone a lot deeper than that for the FBI to come in.

As further evidence of Gallina’s knowledge, Baiseh offers McKinnon-Doxsee’s records of Raycon’s ten cancelled insurance policies from 1994 to 1997 and internal McKinnon-Doxsee memos referring to Rubino’s “terrible [payment] history back to 1996.” Baiseh also refers to Gallina’s recorded statements on the videotape stating that he provided insurance certificates *371 to Nassau County when he knew that Ray-eon did not have insurance, and to Galli-na’s awareness that Rayeon’s insurers repeatedly cancelled Raycon’s insurance. Nevertheless, Gallina continued to seek insurance for Raycon and falsely stated on Raycon’s insurance applications in 1994 and 1998 that Raycon’s insurance had not been cancelled.

In June 2001, Rubino, Jr. filed a bankruptcy petition in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York, and in October 2001, a discharge was granted. Also in October 2001, Rubino, Jr. was arrested and charged with defrauding Nassau County.

B. The District Court Decision

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Bluebook (online)
346 F.3d 366, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 20127, 2003 WL 22255599, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/mark-e-baisch-v-frank-g-gallina-mckinnon-insurance-agency-inc-peter-ca2-2003.